UGA property missing  maybe

ATHENS - Nearly $150,000 worth of state-owned property was reported stolen from the University of Georgia campus last year.

All sorts of things went missing - such as keys valued at a dollar, two bleachers worth $250 and lots of computers valued at thousands of dollars each, according to police reports.

In December alone, $28,806 worth of property was reported stolen to UGA police, including two ATVs valued at $6,994 each, reported missing from the UGA Family Housing Office.

But the theft rate really isn't as bad as the police reports indicate, said UGA's top property officer, Penny Gheesling.

Gheesling, whose job is to keep track of the $690 million worth of property that UGA owns, couldn't give an actual value for what was stolen last year.

But the real value may be about half what was reported, she said.

Much of what is reported as theft is temporarily unaccounted for for some reason, she said.

But if UGA departments can't say where property is, they have to report it as stolen so the piece of property can be entered on a national database of stolen property. That way, property that really is stolen later can be identified if it shows up somewhere else.

"We won't let them write it off as unaccounted for," she said.

What's stolen, missing or misplaced adds up to a lot in a year.

When the Athens Banner-Herald tallied a year's worth of daily police logs on the UGA Police Department Web site, the theft reports added up to $149,328.

But compared to UGA's total property inventory, that's not a lot, Gheesling said. UGA's inventory lists about 93,000 items, with a total value of about $690 million, she said. Personal computers add up to about $68 million - 35,000 computers.

Based on past history, many of the cameras, computers and dozens of other items from wine to wire reported stolen last year will turn out to be not stolen but actually temporarily mislaid or not accounted for correctly, she said - often some of the same items that are frequently targeted by thieves, such as computers and projectors.

"Computers move around a lot from one person to another," she said.

A professor may get a new computer and turn the older one back to his or her department for reassignment to someone else.

Administrators are supposed to file paperwork when a computer is assigned to a different worker, but they don't always do it, Gheesling said.

Sometimes UGA workers just lose track of things.

For example, in May 2005, an annual inventory in the College of Education showed 41 missing computers. When Gheesling ordered a second inventory, workers found 22 of them in various College of Education offices - but 19 computers remained unaccounted for. Education college officials filed a theft report on what looked like a fairly spectacular heist of about $35,000 worth of goods.

But by August 2005, all but one of the computers were accounted for. A College of Education administrator said at the time that the computers had never been missing. New workers didn't inventory them properly during a massive departmental reorganization in which computers had been moved from floor to floor and office to office in Aderhold Hall, he said.

Another aggravating problem in keeping up with computers is cannibalism, Gheesling said - computer cannibalism.

UGA workers often remove parts from an older computer to fix another broken computer, then get rid of the computer carcass after the usable parts have been removed.

The UGA property office has no way to know what happened to the original cannibalized computer, she said.